On Sep 21, 2005, at 8:12 AM, Dave Tweed wrote:

>> > But the worst part, the part they should be killed for, they
>> > were running out of code space - so they DELETED THE COMMENTS!!!
>

> That used to be a trick used with very early tape-based microcomputer
> BASIC interpreters, which kept the entire program -- tokenized source
> along with comments -- in main memory. Deleting comments could free up
> significant amounts of space for additional code tokens.

Tokenized, hell.  Early basic interpreters didn't tokenize; you could
save space by using short forms of keywords, or omitting the "let" in
assignment statements (if that was allowed.)  It's presumably still an
issue on BASIC51 micros.  Note that omitting comments made your program
go FASTER, too!

> AFAIK, this technique never applied to any other language

It's a potential problem with any pure interpreter.  Forth comes to
mind, though its disk access was so primitive that space not used
by comments was wasted anyway.  Postscript would be a modern example.
A postscript program with no comments downloads to the printer faster, 
too.


>  and it faded away once disk-based systems became common.
>
Yes.  Yeah!

BillW
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